MobileWAM: Bridging World Action Models to Mobile Manipulation with Chain-of-Foresight

arXiv:2608.04657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World action models (WAMs) built on video generation backbones are a rising recipe for robot learning, yet remain confined to tabletop manipulation. Mobile manipulation demands simultaneous locomotion and whole-body manipulation amid scene-scale dynamics, yet is still dominated by dynamics-blind visual encoders with hand-crafted coordination. We bridge this gap with MobileWAM, a mixture-of-transformers architecture that fuses a pretrained video diffusion transformer with a lightweight action expert through layerwise joint attention, translating internet-scale motion priors into whole-body control. To reconcile the heterogeneous dynamics of moving and manipulating, each feed-forward layer of the action expert becomes a three-expert mixture of shared, locomotion, and manipulation experts, softly routed by the motion intent in the action tokens. To densify supervision, we further propose Chain-of-Foresight (CoF): intermediate representations sequentially predict a chain of future latent chunks, each step conditioned on its predecessor. CoF pairs naturally with our decoupled video--action denoising scheme. At deployment, the WAM serves as a pure current-frame encoder; foresight acts only through gradients, so at inference the foresight chain and video generation are discarded, leaving only policy-level cost. MobileWAM surpasses state-of-the-art mobile manipulation policies on ManiSkill-HAB and fine-tunes to a real ARX Lift2 mobile manipulator across diverse tasks with strong generalization. Code will be released soon.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-08-06